Critics reviews

Canet has made a film that clicks along efficiently from one hair-raising discovery to the next.

Seeing this thriller isn’t a duty you owe to your superego. It is, rather, an id-driven pleasure, rather like eating chocolate-chip cookies or drinking Irish beer. If you don’t check out this film, your inner hedonist will never forgive you.

The confusion "Tell No One" generates is another matter. But once the final character has put the last puzzle piece in place, courtesy of an epic explanation, a kind of relief sets in: Someone just needed to spell it all out. 

While Tell No One breaks no new ground in the action/thriller genre, it is a tightly paced, assured handling of an exceedingly complex story that will keep you on the edge of your seat for all of its 125 minutes.

Among the movie's many delights are the fluctuating rhythms of its pacing, an atmospheric volatility that sets off the doctor's blooming paranoia against his sunlit, leafy surroundings, and a terrific cast that includes Kristin Scott Thomas as a bitchy lesbian with heart and a quietly funny François Berléand as an obsessive-compulsive detective.

Even if all of this demands a rather preposterous explanation, a wonderfully overblown coda, and a slightly overlong running time, it's still enormously fun to watch, the kind of film that Hollywood seems to have forgotten how to make, but which, in Canet's hands, looks almost laid back.

Hitchcock’s “Wrong Man” scenario gets an invigorating French update in Tell No One.